Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - AI Is the New Tower of Babel (And Its Builders Know It)

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

The new Tower of Babel, and its builders are becoming like gods to us. The bigger threat isn't killer robots; it's how much of your own mind you've already handed over. I joined Mike Slater on Politics By Faith (The First) to talk about AI, faith, and the people building it. We cover: why Babel is always the city AND the tower, how the same AI that discovers drugs can build super viruses, what I'm seeing in my own classroom as term begins, why cognitive offloading scares me more than Terminators, and the one thing AI still can't do without us. AI belongs in your hands as a thinking partner, never the primary creator. Chapters: 00:00 Mike Slater introduces Brian Keating (cosmologist, not cosmetologist) 00:37 Why AI is the Tower of Babel — the city and the tower 02:05 The double-edged sword: new drugs vs. super viruses 02:57 Altman, Amodei, Musk — "they become like gods to us" 03:42 "Regulate us, take us over" — who really wants that 04:23 A scientist weighs progress: "I'm an accelerationist" 05:19 AI as a curiosity amplifier, not a shortcut 06:04 First day of class at UC San Diego — the war over AI 07:22 Thinking partner, not primary creator — and the nuclear analogy 08:20 Cognitive offloading — how many phone numbers do you remember? 09:17 The worldview of the people running AI 10:35 Why I'm not a doomer — and what to actually do (local models) ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeatin... 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: / drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: / @drbriankeating 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: /briankeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to go to a very smart person, Dr. Brian Keating. He is an experimental. I want to say cosmetologist, but that's because I'm not a smart person. He's a cosmologist at UC San Diego, and he's a host of the show, into the impossible with Brian Keating. Dr. Keating, how do you do, sir?

Very well. It's good to be with you. And you can say cosmetology. You look very, you're very handsome and you have good hair. And what the cosmetologists do. But actually, yeah, they do have a preface. I was going to say, what percentage of people call you? you a cosmetologist? More than call me an astrologer, which I'm also not. Okay. Fair enough.

Well, let's chat about AI. You made a reference earlier that AI is like the Tower of Babel. Say more. What are their similarities? Well, you know what's interesting in the Torah and the Old Testament in the Bible? The Tower of Babel is a very famous story, but it's always mentioned without mentioning that in the actual Hebrew, in the original, it's actually always the city and the tower of Babel. In other words, there's an association between the technology and the inhabitants and the population, both the population that creates it, that desires it, that seeks to actually, as it says, make war with God to be as one with one voice, et cetera. And the city, the inhabitants, and the Bible is quite skeptical of cities.

There are good things that come from cities, but there are a lot of bad things that come from cities. And I think one of them is this sensation that you can sort of divorce yourself from the rest of the world, the real people in sort of, you know, flyover country. I always hate that term. But living here in the coast in San Diego, we have, you know, sort of inflated ego about our importance. And I think that's sort of what's happening. We see that with the creation of artificial intelligence, which is both as also as the, also as the, Bible says is a double-edged sword. So I often joke, you know, where are the single-edge swords that only do good? But in this case, it's a double-edged sword. It can do good. It can do wonderful things.

It can discover drugs. It can help your kids with their homework. But it can do awful things, too. It can create super viruses. It can create, you know, incredible weapons and technology that could be used for destruction. And it could teach your kids to fall in love with an AI avatar that doesn't exist and in some cases allegedly be contributing to their propensity for suicide. So how do we monitor this as parents as members of cities of society in America when we can't divorce ourselves from the other countries that are also striving to create this technology? And what I see now is a very terrifying juxtaposition of these two forces, the two sides of the sword, the two edges in that you have the creators, the progenitors, the ones that are responsible for them.

And by the way, they have these interesting names like Sam Altman, like an alternative man. And then Dario Amode, which means lover of God or love of God, right? Amateur Dei means God in Latin. And then Elon Musk, I don't know, maybe he's got a nice smell or something like that. But there are these names that are associated and they become like gods to us, right? They can do superhuman things. It used to be if you had a question, who do you go to? You go to your priest, you go to your rabbi, you go to your minister, you go to your preacher.

Now you tell things that you would never tell to them to the AIs, to get answers, to get the hive mind, the brain, the global brain, working coordinating with the sum total of human knowledge, which is both beautiful and it's terrifying. And these models have gotten incredibly powerful, and there's no slowing them down. and the leaders, the Amundays, the Altmans, they're now saying that we need to slow down our own technology because it's so dangerous and you need to regulate us. And by the way, you may need to take us over. And I think that is the ultimate goal. They want the government to subsidize them. They want the government to be responsible to shepherd them as they play God themselves. And I think that's quite dangerous, unprecedented. And I'm quite excited, but I'm also worried. as somebody who uses it every day for his teaching for his own kids i use it i thrive on it but

you have to be very careful with it it's a very powerful technology i agree with everything is that now to go back to the hour bible the point we made earlier was that they made bricks so this is a technological advancement like wow we're now able to make these bricks in this bitumen and stuff we're able to build taller than ever before i love your city point as well um but it's like anything with these double-edged swords right uh who was it who was it who said that fire can be a good master but a terrible slave or however that goes, right? And you can use a knife to cut your food and you can use a knife to murder someone. So as a scientist, how do you think about technological progress?

How do you think about a scientific advancement and weigh the good and the bad? From a scientific mind, how do you do that? Yeah, purely scientifically, I'm an accelerationist. I would love to see nothing more than the solutions to age old problems. that I've wondered about simply because it would allow me to do something that's uniquely human, which is to have my curiosity stoked to investigate the questions that then I prompt the artificial intelligence with. I think that's the healthiest, the safest way to use it. Use it as a curiosity amplifier. You know, I have graduate students. They're made of flesh and bone. They're the smartest

people, you know, I'll ever know. And I'm entrusted with them by their parents, by the university, etc. And we have deep relationships. I go to their weddings. I counsel them and they're wonderful. They're almost like children, but you know, of course it's separate from my actual children. But I feel responsible for them. I get to interact with them and stimulate their young minds to become the future leaders of science. I worry about them in the age of AI. But currently I'm trying to make them AI native. Right now there's a battle in the university. We start teaching today. Class is open at UC San Diego. And there's a war. between the people that the professors that know how to use AI, that want to use AI,

and the students who want to use it, who use it for good. And then there's also the double-edged sword. Again, you cannot escape this analogy. The double-edged sword is that they use it to do their homework, to solve their problems, to bypass the thought process themselves. You know, when I was a kid in the 90s in college, we had this cartoon in our student newspaper, and it was first day of class,

professor standing up on stage, a room full of students, staring up at the professor in wide-eyed amazement. And then the next day, the students get replaced by tape recorders. Remember those? I don't know. You might be young. You might not remember tape recorders. Tape recorders recording the professor speaking.

And then the last scene is now the professors replaced by tape recorder, playing that lecture to the students who are listening on their tape recorder. It was crazy. Now we have exactly that. You know, my students don't use Instagram in class anymore. They're using AI. It could be great. It could enhance their understanding.

I'm not the best of educator. I often want to take classes with Albert Einstein. I'm too young. I can't do that, unfortunately. But I have all of his collected works. I can create an AIAE, an artificial Einstein. That's the good news. The bad news is that it can completely shortcut the process that not only are these kids dedicating four hard years of their lives to, but they're also, their parents can be spending at a private school. I teach at a public university. But at private schools, quarter million, half a million dollars. That to me is insane. And it's not, not what this technology is best used for. So I caution people to use it as a thinking partner, as a sounding board. It's a wonderful editor, but it cannot be used for primary creation. And recently I had an article that I wrote in my newsletter, my website, Brian Keating.com, and it has to do with the double-edged feature of nuclear power. Nuclear, as you said, fire was a powerful weapon. It could be used. It could be harmful. It could be helpful. Nuclear technology is the embedded analogy. Nuclear technology is used, to end World War II, but now it's threatening America as well.

I'm worried about this cognitive offloading. If we do that for a generation or so, will we even know what to think or how to think? Or can we unload that cognitive thinking process again? Or have we just totally uploaded it to the cloud and now it's gone forever? I worry about that. Yeah, how many phone numbers do you remember?

I guess my last quit. Yeah. Please go ahead. No, I was going to say, as an illustration of the danger that you just mentioned, how many phone numbers do you remember? I mean, I know my mother-in-law, my mother, my wife, in case they're listening. But besides that, I don't even know some of my kids' phone numbers. I can't remember them.

And that's what we've done. We cognitively offloaded, offshored, just like we're doing with jobs with our manufacturing. That has nothing but, you know, at least caution signs that should be flashing in your mind. I can remember my high school friends phone numbers. How about that? I can remember phone numbers from when I was 13. and I wanted to go to Ben's house, but I don't remember, I don't know anyone else's cell phone now. I love that analogy.

What do you say about the people who are running this? I mean, you mentioned their names, and that's very interesting. What is their worldview that maybe we should be concerned about as the people who are going to be controlling this technology? I'm very dismayed by them, to be honest with you. Some of them are, you know, one degree separation, friends of mine, friends of friends of mine. Very scary. When you hear things like Sam Altman when asked in front of Congress about these effects and then considering in the comparison that he made was to, well, don't look at how much energy and data center usage my models used to train to do these queries and responses. Look at how much a cost to train your child until he's 18.

And I thought, you know, a child is a precious gift of God. And an AI is a piece of silicon electrified and, you know, profit. processed in data centers around the world using tremendous amounts of resources that will never be able to capture back. And so I worry about this. I worry what they do with your data. I don't trust it with personal stuff. There's ways to anonymize it.

I'm going to be writing about that on my newsletter. How do you do safe searching? How do you get extract the most out of the technology? But keep your private data. It's the most valuable commodity that you have because it's the one thing like that they cannot do. They have to train on what humans have done, which is by the private data. the way, one of the reasons I'm not as terrified as many of my doomer friends are that it's going to

create a hyper-advanced species of Terminator 9,000s. Because it has to train on what humans do, it is not generative ab initio. It cannot start from scratch and come up with the Brandenburg concertos or come up with Shakespeare or anything, God forbid, anything like the Torah, the Old Testament or the New Testament. It's lame. It's impotent. It needs us, it needs the profits, it needs the minds, it needs human, human intuition. It can't have that so it won't be what we're worried about, but it can do a lot of damage in the meantime, and it can do a lot of good. And I urge people to, to, you know, pay attention, to learn about this, to play around with it. Don't expose private secrets, your medical stuff, your accounting, financial stuff,

make sure you trust what you're doing. There's types of AI called local models, which I write about on my website. How do you run on your own computer? So it never goes to Sam Altman's house and used by that alternative man named Sam. Dr. Brian Keating, experimental cosmologist, UC San Diego. Go watch Into the Impossible with Brian Keating. And then you said the newsletter, Brian Keating.com. Brian, great to talk to you, sir. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, guys. We're some see heroes and other see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings, the end of jobs, or the end of human struggle.

We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.